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“Then what–“

Potter swung himself round to a sitting position and hammered with his open palm upon his knee for emphasis: “Nothing’s the matter with it, I tell you! I simply won’t play it!”

“Why not?”

“I simply won’t play it! I don’t like it!”

The playwright dropped into a chair, open-mouthed. “Will you tell me why you ever accepted it?”

“I don’t like any play! I hate ’em all! I’m through with ’em all! I’m through with the whole business! ‘Show-business!’ Faugh!”

Old Tinker regarded him thoughtfully, then inquired: “Gone back on it?”

“I tell you I’m going to buy a farm!” He sprang up, went to the mantel and struck it a startling blow with his fist, which appeared to calm him somewhat–for a moment. “I’ve been thinking of it for a long time. I ought never to have been in this business at all, and I’m going to live in the country. Oh, I’m in my right mind!” He paused to glare indignantly in response to old Tinker’s steady gaze. “Of course you think ‘something’s happened’ to upset me. Well, nothing has. Nothing of the slightest consequence has occurred since I saw you at rehearsal. Can’t a man be allowed to think? I just came home here and got to thinking of the kind of life I lead–and I decided that I’m tired of it. And I’m not going to lead it any longer. That’s all.”

“Ah,” said Tinker quietly. “Nerves.”

Talbot Potter appealed to the universe with a passionate gesture. “Nerves!” he cried bitterly. “Yes, that’s what they say when an actor dares to think. ‘Go on! Play your part! Be a marionette forever!’ That’s what you tell us! ‘Slave for your living, you sordid little puppet! Squirm and sweat and strut, but don’t you ever dare to think!’ You tell us that because you know if we ever did stop to think for one instant about ourselves you wouldn’t have any actors! Actors! Faugh! What do we get, I ask you?”

He strode close to Tinker and shook a frantic forefinger within a foot of the quiet old fellow’s face.

“What do I get?” he demanded, passionately. “Do you think it means anything to me that some fat old woman sees me making love to a sawdust actress at a matinee and then goes home and hates her fat old husband across the dinner-table?”

He returned to the fireplace, seeming appeased, at least infinitesimally, by this thought. “There wouldn’t even be that, except for the mystery. It’s only because I’m mysterious to them–the way a man always thinks the girl he doesn’t know is prettier than the one he’s with. What’s that got to do with acting? What is acting, anyhow?” His voice rose passionately again. “I’ll tell you one thing it is: It’s the most sordid profession in this devilish world!”

He strode to the centre of the room. “It’s at the bottom–in the muck! That’s where it is. And it ought to be! What am I, out there on that silly platform they call a stage? A fool, that’s all, making faces, and pretending to be somebody with another name, for two dollars! A monkey-on-a-stick for the children! Of course the world despises us! Why shouldn’t it? It calls us mummers and mountebanks, and that’s what we are! Buffoons! We aren’t men and women at all–we’re strolling players! We’re gypsies! One of us marries a broker’s daughter and her relatives say she’s married ‘a damned actor!’ That’s what they say–‘a damned actor!’ Great heavens, Tinker, can’t a man get tired of being called a ‘damned actor’ without your making all this uproar over it–squalling ‘nerves’ in my face till I wish I was dead and done with it!”

He went back to the fireplace again, but omitted another dolorous stroke upon the mantel. “And look at the women in the profession,” he continued, as he turned to face his visitors. “My soul! Look at them! Nothing but sawdust–sawdust–sawdust! Do you expect to go on acting with sawdust? Making sawdust love with sawdust? Sawdust, I tell you! Sawdust–sawdust–saw–“